Navigation

The tarfile module makes it possible to read and write tar
archives, including those using gzip, bz2 and lzma compression.
Use the zipfile module to read or write .zip files, or the
higher-level functions in shutil.

read/write support for the GNU tar format including longname and longlink
extensions, read-only support for all variants of the sparse extension
including restoration of sparse files.

read/write support for the POSIX.1-2001 (pax) format.

handles directories, regular files, hardlinks, symbolic links, fifos,
character devices and block devices and is able to acquire and restore file
information like timestamp, access permissions and owner.

Return a TarFile object for the pathname name. For detailed
information on TarFile objects and the keyword arguments that are
allowed, see TarFile Objects.

mode has to be a string of the form 'filemode[:compression]', it defaults
to 'r'. Here is a full list of mode combinations:

mode

action

'r'or'r:*'

Open for reading with transparent
compression (recommended).

'r:'

Open for reading exclusively without
compression.

'r:gz'

Open for reading with gzip compression.

'r:bz2'

Open for reading with bzip2 compression.

'r:xz'

Open for reading with lzma compression.

'a'or'a:'

Open for appending with no compression. The
file is created if it does not exist.

'w'or'w:'

Open for uncompressed writing.

'w:gz'

Open for gzip compressed writing.

'w:bz2'

Open for bzip2 compressed writing.

'w:xz'

Open for lzma compressed writing.

Note that 'a:gz', 'a:bz2' or 'a:xz' is not possible. If mode
is not suitable to open a certain (compressed) file for reading,
ReadError is raised. Use mode'r' to avoid this. If a
compression method is not supported, CompressionError is raised.

If fileobj is specified, it is used as an alternative to a file object
opened in binary mode for name. It is supposed to be at position 0.

For special purposes, there is a second format for mode:
'filemode|[compression]'. tarfile.open() will return a TarFile
object that processes its data as a stream of blocks. No random seeking will
be done on the file. If given, fileobj may be any object that has a
read() or write() method (depending on the mode). bufsize
specifies the blocksize and defaults to 20*512 bytes. Use this variant
in combination with e.g. sys.stdin, a socket file object or a tape
device. However, such a TarFile object is limited in that it does
not allow to be accessed randomly, see Examples. The currently
possible modes:

The TarFile object provides an interface to a tar archive. A tar
archive is a sequence of blocks. An archive member (a stored file) is made up of
a header block followed by data blocks. It is possible to store a file in a tar
archive several times. Each archive member is represented by a TarInfo
object, see TarInfo Objects for details.

A TarFile object can be used as a context manager in a with
statement. It will automatically be closed when the block is completed. Please
note that in the event of an exception an archive opened for writing will not
be finalized; only the internally used file object will be closed. See the
Examples section for a use case.

The tarinfo argument can be used to replace the default TarInfo class
with a different one.

If dereference is False, add symbolic and hard links to the archive. If it
is True, add the content of the target files to the archive. This has no
effect on systems that do not support symbolic links.

If ignore_zeros is False, treat an empty block as the end of the archive.
If it is True, skip empty (and invalid) blocks and try to get as many members
as possible. This is only useful for reading concatenated or damaged archives.

debug can be set from 0 (no debug messages) up to 3 (all debug
messages). The messages are written to sys.stderr.

If errorlevel is 0, all errors are ignored when using TarFile.extract().
Nevertheless, they appear as error messages in the debug output, when debugging
is enabled. If 1, all fatal errors are raised as OSError
exceptions. If 2, all non-fatal errors are raised as TarError
exceptions as well.

The encoding and errors arguments define the character encoding to be
used for reading or writing the archive and how conversion errors are going
to be handled. The default settings will work for most users.
See section Unicode issues for in-depth information.

Changed in version 3.2: Use 'surrogateescape' as the default for the errors argument.

The pax_headers argument is an optional dictionary of strings which
will be added as a pax global header if format is PAX_FORMAT.

Extract all members from the archive to the current working directory or
directory path. If optional members is given, it must be a subset of the
list returned by getmembers(). Directory information like owner,
modification time and permissions are set after all members have been extracted.
This is done to work around two problems: A directory’s modification time is
reset each time a file is created in it. And, if a directory’s permissions do
not allow writing, extracting files to it will fail.

Warning

Never extract archives from untrusted sources without prior inspection.
It is possible that files are created outside of path, e.g. members
that have absolute filenames starting with "/" or filenames with two
dots "..".

Extract a member from the archive to the current working directory, using its
full name. Its file information is extracted as accurately as possible. member
may be a filename or a TarInfo object. You can specify a different
directory using path. File attributes (owner, mtime, mode) are set unless
set_attrs is false.

Note

The extract() method does not take care of several extraction issues.
In most cases you should consider using the extractall() method.

Extract a member from the archive as a file object. member may be a filename
or a TarInfo object. If member is a regular file or a link, an
io.BufferedReader object is returned. Otherwise, None is
returned.

Add the file name to the archive. name may be any type of file
(directory, fifo, symbolic link, etc.). If given, arcname specifies an
alternative name for the file in the archive. Directories are added
recursively by default. This can be avoided by setting recursive to
False. If exclude is given, it must be a function that takes one
filename argument and returns a boolean value. Depending on this value the
respective file is either excluded (True) or added
(False). If filter is specified it must be a keyword argument. It
should be a function that takes a TarInfo object argument and
returns the changed TarInfo object. If it instead returns
None the TarInfo object will be excluded from the
archive. See Examples for an example.

Changed in version 3.2: Added the filter parameter.

Deprecated since version 3.2: The exclude parameter is deprecated, please use the filter parameter
instead.

Create a TarInfo object for either the file name or the file
objectfileobj (using os.fstat() on its file descriptor). You can modify
some of the TarInfo‘s attributes before you add it using addfile().
If given, arcname specifies an alternative name for the file in the archive.

A TarInfo object represents one member in a TarFile. Aside
from storing all required attributes of a file (like file type, size, time,
permissions, owner etc.), it provides some useful methods to determine its type.
It does not contain the file’s data itself.

TarInfo objects are returned by TarFile‘s methods
getmember(), getmembers() and gettarinfo().

File type. type is usually one of these constants: REGTYPE,
AREGTYPE, LNKTYPE, SYMTYPE, DIRTYPE,
FIFOTYPE, CONTTYPE, CHRTYPE, BLKTYPE,
GNUTYPE_SPARSE. To determine the type of a TarInfo object
more conveniently, use the is_*() methods below.

There are three tar formats that can be created with the tarfile module:

The POSIX.1-1988 ustar format (USTAR_FORMAT). It supports filenames
up to a length of at best 256 characters and linknames up to 100 characters. The
maximum file size is 8 GiB. This is an old and limited but widely
supported format.

The GNU tar format (GNU_FORMAT). It supports long filenames and
linknames, files bigger than 8 GiB and sparse files. It is the de facto
standard on GNU/Linux systems. tarfile fully supports the GNU tar
extensions for long names, sparse file support is read-only.

The POSIX.1-2001 pax format (PAX_FORMAT). It is the most flexible
format with virtually no limits. It supports long filenames and linknames, large
files and stores pathnames in a portable way. However, not all tar
implementations today are able to handle pax archives properly.

The pax format is an extension to the existing ustar format. It uses extra
headers for information that cannot be stored otherwise. There are two flavours
of pax headers: Extended headers only affect the subsequent file header, global
headers are valid for the complete archive and affect all following files. All
the data in a pax header is encoded in UTF-8 for portability reasons.

There are some more variants of the tar format which can be read, but not
created:

The ancient V7 format. This is the first tar format from Unix Seventh Edition,
storing only regular files and directories. Names must not be longer than 100
characters, there is no user/group name information. Some archives have
miscalculated header checksums in case of fields with non-ASCII characters.

The SunOS tar extended format. This format is a variant of the POSIX.1-2001
pax format, but is not compatible.

The tar format was originally conceived to make backups on tape drives with the
main focus on preserving file system information. Nowadays tar archives are
commonly used for file distribution and exchanging archives over networks. One
problem of the original format (which is the basis of all other formats) is
that there is no concept of supporting different character encodings. For
example, an ordinary tar archive created on a UTF-8 system cannot be read
correctly on a Latin-1 system if it contains non-ASCII characters. Textual
metadata (like filenames, linknames, user/group names) will appear damaged.
Unfortunately, there is no way to autodetect the encoding of an archive. The
pax format was designed to solve this problem. It stores non-ASCII metadata
using the universal character encoding UTF-8.

The details of character conversion in tarfile are controlled by the
encoding and errors keyword arguments of the TarFile class.

encoding defines the character encoding to use for the metadata in the
archive. The default value is sys.getfilesystemencoding() or 'ascii'
as a fallback. Depending on whether the archive is read or written, the
metadata must be either decoded or encoded. If encoding is not set
appropriately, this conversion may fail.

In case of PAX_FORMAT archives, encoding is generally not needed
because all the metadata is stored using UTF-8. encoding is only used in
the rare cases when binary pax headers are decoded or when strings with
surrogate characters are stored.